Anyone working in the 80s and 90s in post and broadcast
remembers the sneaker net. Running tapes around a newsroom or post house and
hoping the elevator wait is not long because running up 10 flights of stairs
won’t work with the looming deadline.

With digital workflows, a new type of sneaker net formed
that replaced physical tapes with portable RAIDs and isolated workstations
working on different parts of a project. Digital workflows were supposed to
bring everyone together, not waste time with panicked, last minute conforms
trying to get an edit from a workstation using one type of software to a
workstation down the hall using a different VFX program.

New York City’s Urban Sled production and post studio had
enough.

Urban Sled creates media for screens large and small and
provides production and post production for some of the world’s largest
corporations, advertisers and media companies. At the 2,000 square foot
headquarters, the team preps shoots, edits, color corrects, composites, does
sound mixing and creates 2D and 3D graphics.

Jedidiah Mitchell

In order to combat the wasted hours and not being able to
seamlessly collaborate, Jedidiah Mitchell, director, colorist and VFX artist,
built Urban Sled’s new collaborative workflow.

He explained a challenge Urban Sled regularly faces,
“We make event-driven content for some of our biggest clients, so it’s
time-sensitive and the subjects aren’t available until the last minute. For
instance, we’d be hired to make spots to promote a partnership with an award
show. That might mean three to five scripted shoots with different celebrities,
products or locations related to the event. The content needs to go live before
the show, featuring award nominees who have only just been announced and
that will only be relevant to the brand for a few weeks.

“The window from concept to shoot to ship is incredibly
narrow, often incorporating footage from past years, other agencies and
multiple concurrent shoots of our own. We need to cut all the fat from our workflow and get into post immediately,
before shooting has even wrapped. On top of all that, most of these spots
feature at least two big brands, so the quality expectations are high, and we
need to be flexible enough to address any client notes we receive, just like we
would on a TVC.”

Consolidating
Editing, VFX and Grading onto DaVinci Resolve Studio

When Mitchell first started working with Urban Sled, the
post house was using a mix of different NLE and VFX software along with DaVinci
Resolve Studio for grading. This required extensive round-tripping and
conforms, as well as repeating tasks when the inevitable changes came in after
picture lock. Time was being wasted, and it was a serious drain on the studio
and its employees.

“We made it work for a long time, but by mid-2018, Urban Sled
was shooting, editing and finishing too much content to handle efficiently
without some kind of collaboration,” Mitchell said.

He continued, “Around 2016, DaVinci Resolve Studio slid into
the picture because of the performance. It started in the color suite where we
needed real-time playback but seeing what my DaVinci Resolve Studio workstation
could do inspired a lot of interest from editors too.

“As Blackmagic Design added more features to DaVinci Resolve
Studio, the editors at Urban Sled began switching for the performance. At
first, we used disk databases, one per workstation, but there was still a lot
of overhead transferring projects from Mac editing systems to the DaVinci
Resolve Studio color suite, so in 2018 we started looking at the next step up:
shared databases and storage.”

After starting to edit in DaVinci Resolve Studio, Mitchell
made the move to using Fusion Studio for VFX work.

Mitchell explained, “Every commercial project today needs
some kind of beauty retouching, product replacement, rig removal, etc. Our
tools have to be integrated and flexible enough to keep up with a changing edit
but also powerful enough to handle heavier CGI compositing when it’s needed. We
used to do everything in different VFX software, but the licenses were
expensive to maintain for our size shop, so when Blackmagic Design bought
Fusion, I picked it up immediately.

“Using a racked renderfarm, I installed Fusion Studio render
licenses on all the nodes, and now I can kick out tasks to the farm, move on to
the next shot without bogging down my workstation, and everyone collaborating
on the project in DaVinci Resolve Studio can see VFX shots in their edits
updating in real-time as the frames are written to our shared storage.”

Urban
Sled’s Collaborative Workflow

DaVinci Resolve Studio is designed for collaboration from
the ground up so that everyone can work together in parallel on the same
project at the same time. Each artist gets a page with the dedicated tools
and interfaces needed to get their specific job done. All of the work is tied
together and managed by a database, universal timeline and advanced image and
sound processing engines. This makes it possible for editors, colorists, VFX
artists, animators and sound engineers to work together simultaneously.
Customers no longer have to deal with importing and exporting files,
translating projects, losing work or conforming and managing changes.

“Built around DaVinci Resolve Studio, we’ve now
got a fully collaborative setup running with four workstations directly
connected over 10G, plus more low priority workstations and a Fusion Studio
renderfarm on a 1G network,” said Mitchell. “We’ve been hitting it daily for
about three months without any downtime. It would be very hard to go back to
isolated storage because this setup is incredibly productive and well worth the
investment.

“Beauty and product spots benefit hugely from DaVinci
Resolve Studio’s color and live compositing tools, while larger campaigns with
many deliverables benefit more from the workflow efficiencies. Not all projects
benefit equally, but the more we unify our workflow the better it works for all
our clients.

“For example, on some jobs we’re
simultaneously delivering a longer brand film, a handful of broadcast spots and
dozens of unique cut-downs for social media. I could be grading the first
spot while an editor is still cutting it in the next room, while another editor is starting the
second spot and an assistant is logging and loading the third spot.

“Maybe 50 percent of the footage is common across all of the
spots, and because we’re in one DaVinci Resolve Studio project together using
collaboration, Remote Grades and shared storage, the shots I’ve graded in the
first spot are already finished in the second and third spots before they’ve
been fully edited. And when we get notes back from the client, changes I make
are rippled throughout the project automatically. That is a huge deal when we
have 30 deliverables on a tight deadline. “

Urban Sled also does sound mixing in-house and has begun
testing DaVinci Resolve’s Fairlight audio post tools. In the next year, it
plans on replacing its existing audio and motion graphics software and having
every part of the studio, other than CGI, working collaboratively in DaVinci
Resolve Studio and Fusion Studio.

Mitchell concluded, “It really is life changing — ballpark
estimate, I think we’re saving up to 20 percent of our labor overhead on jobs,
and we’re actually going home during crunches.”